


Make This Bread to Rise

by Cerulea



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst and Pining, Baker Dean Winchester, Canon-Typical Violence, Hurt Dean Winchester, M/M, PTSD, Touch-Starved, Trauma, Winchester Brother Feels, canon-divergent, post-Michael
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-13
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-17 09:41:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16972212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cerulea/pseuds/Cerulea
Summary: Dean isn’t the same as he used to be. After Michael, he can’t be. But he gets dressed every morning and he keeps breathing and he re-learns how to be a person with the help of his brother and his new-found career as a borderline mute Deli owner. Every day that Dean can make an omelette without accidentally killing someone is a good day. But even as things come to equalibrium, there’s a noticeable hole in his daily life. A person who’s absence is so painful, it hurts more to ask, than it does to pretend he doesn’t miss him.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Well hello there, fandom! Here I am again, as always, trying to get back into the swing of writing regularly. I’m feeling a little rusty but I’ve got this fixation currently with battered post-Michael Dean so I’m going to go ahead and vomit all of my ideas about him and his damage and longing and his utter softness all over y’all. Good? Good.  
> This is a work in progress. Any mistakes are my own, and comments are appreciated.

Dean’s life is dictated by a practiced regimen. 

Every morning he starts by cleaning. Maybe it’s redundant, since every night, he ends by cleaning. But there’s something comfortingly systematic about it. Tidying. It’s repetitive and simple. He sanitizes every countertop, as well as the sinks, restocks all of his tools and cutlery from the industrial dishwasher, re-sets the things he needs from the proper storage places he had returned them to the night before. His brother seems surprised, consistently, when he witnesses Dean’s procedure but even that is in following with a well-memorized routine. Sam has never really managed to acknowledge this part of him. Dean has always been organized to a fault when he’s been serious about something. With hunting, he was painfully orchestrated in his visage of carelessness. When he tossed something in the trunk, seemingly without looking, it was because he’d planned to; he’d done it a million times before, knew exactly where it would land. When he left beer cans around, or his socks in the sink, it was because he was playing his role. That was just as important, it seemed to him, as his constant, methodical cleaning of their guns, or the diligent maintenance on the car.

The truth is, Dean’s compulsive cleanliness has flourished in this new setting, but was in no way created by it.

He’s a cook now. That’s his calling. His dedication goes into kneading dough and setting the oven. He sneers when Sam calls him, accurately so, a “baker”. To Dean, baking is a woman’s hobby, or a jovial fat man with a red nose and sausage-fingers. Dean’s not a baker. He’s a cook. And he tells his brother so. Sam looks disappointed, which serves to make Dean’s self-worth dip just a bit lower than where it usually rests below sea level, but he says nothing. That hurts too. Sam used to argue. He used to roll his eyes and tell him why he was wrong. But that part of their relationship has fizzled, and amidst all the ruin of the past thirty years, Dean can’t stomach to untangle why. That way lies madness because he knows, he won’t acknowledge it but he knows, that this is his fault too. Sam’s new reluctance to speak up.

Nothing has really been the same.

They try.

Sam tries.

But Dean is... tired. He’s more than that, he’s weary. Toward the end of it all, there were moments he thought he’d break apart. All of it just twisting him up inside until he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t even call for help. Not that he would. The only thing, the only person, that seemed to hold him together was...

Dean sets himself upon the task of setting up the kitchen for the day. The dragging of the cloth against the counter is mesmerizing, and it calms his mind. 

...

 

He wants to try out the recipe for crepes he’s been researching. It doesn’t look too impossible, and they have the versatility of savory and sweet. He’s been wanting to try making them for over a year but has only just worked up the courage to attempt something that looks so... fragile.

Dean is a man who breaks things. He’s a man who’s killed and tortured and he has blood on his hands and evil in his heart. He isn’t a person who should be pouring delicate French batter onto a stove top with exacting precision and patience. But here he is, doing just that.

It started with cooking for Dad and Sam, when he was a kid. Or maybe it started even earlier, hanging at his mother’s side as she cooked and hummed and asked him to taste-test. Feeding someone has always been the most straightforward and deeply meaningful way to care for his loved ones and Dean could do it on a penny.

He stopped cooking for years though. They just hunted and hunted and fought and fought and subsisted on takeout and gas station burritos until all of a sudden Dean couldn’t hunt anymore. He couldn’t read, or speak, or hold a gun.

But he could cook.

That, at least, didn’t go.

So he cooked.

At first little things - a grilled cheese for Sam. Then spaghetti for Sam. Then chicken parmigiana for Sam and whoever. He started making little grocery lists, in his stilted, shaky-scratch way, and Sam being the mercifully intuitive brother that he is didn’t ask any questions; merely went out and acquired the things.

It took a little more focus, but before long Dean was up to cooking enough for an army. Which was essentially what he was doing.

There are forty people who shouldn’t exist living in the bunker, Sam included.

People from a world that Dean knows too much about - more than he should, as himself, but not as much as Michael, who tried to keep him scared and confused but not well-informed. He wasn’t from here, but he knew enough to know that Dean Winchester would be able to glue together some sort of reckless, eleventh hour rebellion if he was given too much information. Any detail accidentally given, no matter how small, was a detail a Winchester might be able to build on. And Michael didn’t want Dean building. So everything he knew about the bad place was a marbled mess of undersaturated apocalyptic dust clouds and violence and Sam with his throat ripped out and refugee-humans being blown to shreds in the woods.

Probably all of them by now. Except the ones they stole.

_Saved_. The ones they saved.

They don’t talk to him. The survivors. Sam doesn’t go into detail but he sheepishly mentions one day, as vaguely as possible, that Dean may have been a little frightening back in the early days of his return to consciousness and upright mobility. Dean doesn’t remember a lot of that time, but he figures he must have been something. Because these people are from the apocalypse, and the older ones always look wary while the younger ones look outright scared to be alone with him. So no, Dean doesn’t have a great relationship with the horde of strangers living in his once-home.

It went a long way toward his inspiration to leave.

He cooked for them. Cleaned their guns. Mostly stayed out of the way, but he couldn’t listen to the cases, the stories of death and blood and vanished people. He couldn’t even offer up his thirty years of knowledge because his brain had been through the Archangel scramble and somewhere between his brain stem and his lips everything went sideways and wrong. So he couldn’t help. And he couldn’t sleep with so many people milling around. He couldn’t relax. He couldn’t keep track of whether they should all be familiar, these people from the other world. He knew, objectively, that he should recognize at least a handful of them. Sam was a gracious and kind go-between, and even some of the strangers went out of their way to be friendly. But ultimately, Dean felt out of place.

Because there were forty one people who shouldn’t be alive living in the bunker, Dean included.

They never thought Dean would be the one to leave first, but ultimately it was too much. The noise, the bustle, the responsibility. He doesn’t feel like a man who can take care of people anymore. He isn’t sure he ever was.

Sam keeps his room at the bunker empty, of course, set up just the way Dean painstakingly organized it. It stays closed, like an offering of respect to the Dean he used to be. The Dean he always was, before he said “Yes”. Sometimes when Sam feels hollow without him there, he opens the door, flicks on the light and looks around. In that way, it’s as though his brother had died and Sam needs these occasional brief reminders to pick at that scab, to remember and see, physically, that Dean really was here.

But Dean isn’t dead. Just... different. He doesn’t want the reminder of what he isn’t, the constant talking, the obligation or even the living underground. He needs air, and solitude. He doesn’t want anyone around to see him wince when he gets up from sitting too long, or flinch when he turns wrong, or someone touches him and his skin burns.

They never thought Dean would be the first one to say, “I’ve done enough.”

Sam still isn’t sure how he feels about it.

Sam doesn’t argue when Dean decides, professes in that quiet way he does now, that he needs to go. There’s a desperation underneath the calm of his furrowed brow and strong jaw that Sam is certain no one else could see. No one else but maybe... it doesn’t matter. The only other person who knew him like that is gone, and the hole left behind is so treacherously painful that neither of them can even acknowledge that he was ever there. But Sam knows he would have seen the desperate _please don’t fight me on this, please don’t make me rethink it_ that hides behind Dean’s stoicism.

It wasn’t difficult to orchestrate the little shop a scant forty five minutes away from the bunker. Dean’s head had throbbed as he had tried to read about business loans and taxes and property value, but Sam, steadfast as he’d ever been, simply absorbed the challenge into his daily duties of delegation and lore-scouring. They’d gotten good enough with the tricks Charlie had taught them that faking what they needed in order to look legitimate wasn’t as hard as it really should have been. Generally they kept their high-tech thievery to a minimum, but Sam was adamant. He wanted to start Dean off right; wanted him to be “safe” he’d said. 

The idea to open his own shop had come in an instant, secured as his plan of action just as fast. He’d been out for a drive - it’d taken months of hard work to get to a place where he could handle it, physically and otherwise. Turns out being an Archangel’s vessel plays havoc on the hand-eye coordination and depth perception. Not to mention the crippling post-traumatic psychosis that left Dean occasionally convinced he was under attack and then immediately baffled when it seemed he, in fact, wasn’t. But when he finally passed all of Sam’s tests, and been certified to drive, he started doing so often. He was doing just that, driving aimlessly, when he passed the quaint little shop with the FOR SALE sign up in the window. It was a square little place, standing alone just down the street from the quaintest sliver of what one of these small towns must’ve called downtown. Just close enough to function as a business, just far enough to be alone. Dean slowed down, idled outside for a few minutes, and decided then that it was his. 

Words failed Dean more often than not, so it was a brief show-and-tell via wrangling his brother into the car, driving back to the shop, and idling outside of it, again, just looking at Sam expectantly. Dean isn’t really surprised by how easy it is - Sam looks at the shop, momentarily flummoxed, then back to Dean. Then back to the shop. His voice is soft but sure when he turns to Dean and nods once saying, “Ok.” Dean will never have words for how thankful he is for Sam in moments like that. 

...

The process of renovating the space was soothing to Dean. Demolition and reconstruction came to him easily. It gave him the occasional twinge of regret when he thought back to the life he’d almost had with Lisa and Ben, a million years ago, and sometimes his body ached so much it made him nauseated and weak enough to drop the hammer. But ultimately, the challenge and the activity felt good. It wasn’t life or death, there was very little stress involved with studs and drywall. When he collapsed into his mattress those nights he actually slept, felled hard like a tree into his memory foam and out like a light within minutes. Restful sleep was such a rarity, Dean actually felt better despite the constant ache of his body. He felt stronger than he had in a long time. And he enjoyed the long hours with Sam, quiet though they were. It was nice to work alongside him. They didn’t talk much, hardly looked at each other, but they made a good team and Dean was comfortable. Also a rarity.

The first time they toured the little house out back of the deli Sam peered at Dean through scrunched up eyebrows, utterly unconvinced. “Dean, this place is...” His eyes darted from the uneven floorboards to the water spots on the faded wallpaper.

It was a foreclosure. Nothing spooky, just an old couple who had run a cobbler’s business in the shop that Dean’s deli now occupied and had raised three well-adjusted and successful kids who had gone away to school and then off to their lives and careers outside of rural Kansas, ultimately bringing their elderly parents to an ensuite in-law apartment when the business was retired and the house too much to care for. It had been purchased that year by a young guy who fancied himself a DIY genius and had hoped to flip it. By Dean’s estimation, he barely got through the bathroom and kitchen before the money ran out and he’d had to cut and run, resale value in rural Kansas probably not being what he’d hoped.

It worked out for Dean though, who was antsy for the continuation of his new favorite pastime of construction-related manual labor. The kitchen and bathroom being in functional shape made the project easier, since he planned to be residing in the house as soon as possible.

“It’s pretty busted up,” Sam noted, not unkindly as Dean’s mind wandered away with him as it sometimes does now. His brother’s voice wakes him from the reverie, from where he’d been running his finger over the smoothed wood of the chair rail.

Dean had wanted to look him in the eye and say something poignant about how even the most busted up things can become functional again with enough effort. But all he’d been able to manage was a barely-there flash of eye contact and a shrug.

...

Dean had enough ill-gotten cash that he didn’t have to set himself too severe a deadline. Though he worried that without the motivation he’d sink into apathy and rot in the house, the lack of anxiety at having to make decisions at a breakneck speed relaxed him. He’d been rushing in some way or another for the entirety of his adult life, and living from wall to wall and beer to beer eased some of the panic out of him. He worked sincerely, but not as quickly as maybe he once would have. He savored each project, each stumbling block. Then he would look up and so much more would be done - tangible visual evidence of his and Sam’s hard work that made Dean feel human and accomplished.

When it came time to open, to move out, Dean couldn’t wait. He thought he’d be nervous, hesitant maybe, to leave his brother behind for the first time of his actual free will. But instead he just felt relief. To be alone, in a quiet space, working diligently without having to hear about what poor midwestern family had their guts ripped out or which of their acquaintances was broken and brutalized for their efforts to stem the endless tide.

He needed to be done. This, a small, niche business in between two medium-sized towns in Kansas with a busted little farmhouse out back is how Dean has ended it.

Admittedly, it isn’t how he thought this would go.

He gets up early every morning and he opens up shop, diligently cleaning every counter and sink, and setting out fresh coffee and last night’s confectionary adventures. He straightens his sandwich menus (there are only five print-outs, and the options are limited but hearty, the addition of crepes scrawled onto the bottom in blue pen) and he cooks. Whenever the odd traveler passes by, it forces him to interact with humanity which Sam says is good and he cooks.

It feels enough like purpose.

 


	2. Chapter 2

The sun is warm, heavy as it seeps through the windows at the front of the shop. Dean is counting the cash in the register after a surprisingly busy lunch rush, and Sam is sitting backwards on a chair, long legs sprawled either direction, hands picking at his jeans as he frowns down at them, mind obviously at work.

“I don’t like this. Us not... talking.”

“We talk,” Dean shrugs, dismissively.

“Dean,” Sam starts warningly, “just don’t, ok? Don’t do that.”

“I’m not doing anyth-”

“That’s the point!” Sam shouts, but the sight of his brother’s wide eyes deflate him and he slouches heavily into his chair, exhaling. “I feel like... without a case we’re just... not able to - Do you remember when you got snatched by that Djinn? You said you ended up in this imperfect Pleasantville where mom had never died. We never became hunters and,” he stares at Dean expectantly, “we never really clicked.”

Dean clenches his jaw against the deepening of that familiar constant cold pit in his stomach. It vibrates with every memory, every mention of ‘the life’. He hates that memory in particular for all the conflict it breeds - how could he, even for a moment, prefer a world in which his mom is dead, Jess is dead, their lives are blood and fists and bullets, just because it’s melded them two together? That memory brings him guilt and regret and massive confusion.

But Sam has a point. Maybe what held them together, what kept them inseparable and in sync wasn’t their brotherly love but just the job?

Bullshit.

“No,” Dean says, shaking his head.

Sam doesn’t speak, just watches him. He’s gotten better at that. It’s just one of the many ways he’s grown that Dean’s now had time and space to acknowledge.

When Sam was fresh from Stanford, all anger and resentment, he couldn’t listen. He was smart, he’s always smart, but he was bull-headed and he’d rather ram his horns into you that let you get a word in. Now that Dean’s a person that isn’t good at arguing, he’s had time to watch his brother argue. There’s no shortage of fight in Sam, but he’s mellowed in his age. He’s gotten more cunning, more careful. And he’s patient.

Huh, Dean looks at him, all long limbs and calculating mind, sprawled across a wiry chair like he’s got the time to wait, to let Dean decide what he wants to say. Sam is patient.

No, they’re not going to grow apart. It isn’t possible. Dean finishes counting his drawer, gathers his words. “We’re not us because of the job, Sam.” He manages to glance up and catches his brother’s relieved expression. “I know it’s... everything has been... harder.”

“I’m sorry-”

“‘S not your fault.”

“You wouldn’t have done it if Lucifer hadn’t had me-“

“Sam,” his voice is low, stern, the way their father’s used to get. And it puts a shudder through the both of them but it’s enough to interrupt Sam’s train of thought. “I’m not sorry. I needed to do it. We’ve been over that and I don’t want to beat that horse again. It’s done, it was my choice. I’m living with the consequences - we both are.” He ever so slightly smirks at his brother, “Better than the alternative.”

Sam snorts, smiles, shaking his head, then looks at Dean for a long moment. “I guess I kind of miss you. Is that weird?”

“Absolutely,” Dean deadpans. “But what about our lives isn’t?”

That night when Sam leaves he hugs Dean hard. It hurts, twinges Dean’s aching back and alights a little prickle of fire to large swaths of his skin, but he doesn’t let go.

That night, he sleeps.

And Sam, in the bunker, sleeps too.

...

 

There’s a shotgun under the metal prep table, a jug of holy water in the fridge. It’s a small operation and no one comes back here but him. There’s a narrow channel hollowed out of each doorway’s grout, full of salt, and sigils painted then made to disappear before human eyes on nearly every wall. Dean may be retired but he’s not sloppy.

At this point if some low-lever demon shows up at his deli, gets through the wards, and manages to keep Dean’s spidey-senses from tingling long enough to get the drop, Dean will all but shrug and die. There’s only so much of his minimal energy that can be put into that kind of paranoia.

Dean worries about unusual things now - how much water he’s using, whether stocking plastic utensils at the shop is bad for the environment, how much of his hearing he’s really lost, if he should have opened some sort of life insurance policy for himself in case the past comes back to bite him and there’s no one left for Sam.

He worries about the future. The collective human future. And not in the specific, dire ways that he used to when the apocalypse seemed ever-looming and the threat of Croatoan or Michael v Lucifer was legitimate and just narrowly missed. No, now he worries about politics, and smog and triglycerides. He tries to throw himself wholeheartedly into those worries because he thinks, he hopes, that it can distract him from the bigger issues.

To keep himself busy, to make himself normal, Dean opens a savings account. He sees a doctor, without anything being broken or his heart having momentarily stopped, for the first time in over thirty years. He reads the news and tries to stay informed, he listens to NPR in the early mornings when he’s setting up the kitchen, and waits to switch to classic rock until the shop is open. He balances his checkbook and places his orders for the shop and is an all-around responsible small business owner.

He’s put himself in the situation where strangers approach him daily, and every day he has to fight a little less not to mutter cristo under his breath or god forbid just knife them on the spot. So far all they’ve done is order food, pay for it, and either sit down to eat or leave. They’re just people. Like Dean pretends to be now. 

 

...

 

One of the hardest things, is teaching himself to sleep.

Dean’s been on a late to bed early to rise schedule since about five years old, and his body, though tired in a way he thinks most people cannot even fathom, cannot seem to break the lifelong habit of resisting rest.

He sleeps lightly, every sound rousing him quickly, with a hand already clenching for a weapon and pupils already dilating. The empty hours of his evenings seem endless without research or driving or investigating with Sam. He thought he would be relieved to be able to rest, to take the time to be lazy. But he lies awake at night, feeling like a useless coward. Feeling, in those quiet moments more than ever like he has betrayed his very purpose by choosing to be free. He wonders how many innocent lives have been ripped to shreds, how many other little boys’ mothers are stolen away, while he lays in his bed feeling sorry for himself.

More than any others, those are the times when Dean most doubts what he’s done. This decision, to be finished.

He was never supposed to make it out alive. He never imagined an after. And if he’d dared to fantasize, he wouldn’t have dreamed himself to be alone.

It’s in these moments that he allows himself to think of Cas.

In truth, his mind conjures memories of him all the time. But these quiet, lonely moments are when Dean lets himself sink into it. He hadn’t known until after Michael, after an archangel had ripped into his mind and torn everything out so he was forced to look at it, to look at himself himself, raw and without pretense or bravado or a place to hide.He hadn’t known until then, when Michael made him really look at himself, and then haphazardly shoved it all back in - the pieces of Dean, all a jumble. He hadn’t known until it was all over and every unspoken thought and unacknowledged truth was utterly, impotently clearer than ever.

The truth hurts because of everything it isn’t. Everything Dean didn’t even know he’d deeply hoped for, in his most private and sacred ways.

All impossible now. All gone, since the moment Dean opened his eyes and looked around, and noticed immediately who was missing.

...

 

There was a period of time, in the beginning, when Dean had just been spit out by Michael and there was no way he was going to survive, that his body baffled him. It was as though he didn’t know how to use it anymore. With Michael gone, much of the angelic maintenance dissipated with his death, leaving Dean with the muscle mass of a coma patient and a sudden need for nutrients he hadn’t received in months. Sam will never forget the look of it, the nightmare transformation of Dean’s body collapsing on itself, crushing in with sudden starvation.

He didn’t wake for two weeks.

Sam was certain he’d be that way forever, but he kept on anyway. He kept changing his IVs, kept washing him and tucking blankets around him and talking to him.

When Dean opened his eyes they were vacant, and that too will haunt Sam until he dies.

For another two weeks Dean only barely wakes, hardly moves, doesn’t seem to understand anything Sam says. His waking is unpredictable and it keeps Sam hungry and exhausted at his side until the other start taking shifts to watch him. They feed him, update him on what’s going on in the world, but after the first time one of them dares to try and gets a teary, livid tirade in response none of them attempt to convince Sam to take a night off. Sam refused to leave, just in case.

So he’s there every time. Whenever Dean wakes - sometimes with a wheeze, shaking, sometimes as though he’s blinking awake from a long rest - Sam is there.

After awhile Dean starts to move. Little impulses that don’t seem entirely intentional. But every once in a while he acknowledges Sam, looks him in the eyes. And eventually he can blink for yes or no, though he gets confused and overwhelmed.

He doesn’t remember.

He never seems to remember having woken before.

Dean is like something new, that has to be taught how to drink and eat and stand and walk. Except that he is very much not new. In that he has to be taught how to distinguish memory from reality, and how not to kill people he doesn’t recognize.

He’s weak. Sore. His depth perception is shot and everything he does takes more effort than Sam can imagine having to deal with. But slowly, he comes back.

The first day Dean speaks, Sam makes it to his room, door closed tightly behind him, before he holds his hand over his mouth and cries. He isn’t sure if it’s because it’s so fucking tragic, or because he’s so relieved, but it feels cathartic and that night, finally, he sleeps.

 

...

 

Sam comes by the shop whenever he needs a break from the bunker. The whole arrangement actually works out pretty well. Dean is a great excuse to duck out when the responsibility and the weight are too much. It’s more often than he could have predicted, but he isn’t ashamed. He’s too self-aware at this point in his life to deny himself whatever small amount of calm and contentment he can come by.

That’s what it is, he thinks, watching Dean knead dough from across the shop - contentment.

Sam likes being here with him.

Sam likes that Dean is here to be with.

He knows at times Dean questions how he could possibly have scraped out alive, how he could be the one that made it. Sam knows he hates himself sometimes, for what they’ve lost, who is missing. And Sam allows himself brief instances of macabre despair because he’s earned it, but ultimately he won’t delude himself. He’s heartbroken, but he’s also glad. He’s glad Dean is here.

He’s sorry Dean is lonely, that he carries the weight of Castiel like a phantom limb. But he’s glad that he’s here to be sad in the first place. Sam is grateful, for afternoons in the sunny front room of the shop, watching his brother frown over the industrial dishwasher and its buttons that stick.

“Piece of crap,” Dean mutters under his breath, kicking the machine then immediately scrubbing out the mark he left. And Sam huffs a soft laugh, because that’s him. That’s Dean.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think this is turning out to be as much a study as it is a story. Again, any mistakes are my own, so I appreciate your indulgence at my utter abuse of punctuation (I just fucking LOVE commas y’all). 
> 
> Tune in next chapter for an amazing phenomenon starring Daniel Day Lewis entitled - “There Will Be Plot”.


	3. Chapter 3

There’s a college girl that comes in sometimes. Grad student, maybe. She wears her black hair up in a messy bun, taps her pen against her angular chin when she’s thinking, and looks a little too hard into Dean’s eyes with her own dark blue when she orders. Dean finds himself watching her some days, when his body hurts and the sky is too sunny. When he feels too much like he doesn’t fit into his own existence. It takes him weeks to figure out why watching her is almost comforting. His gaze isn’t sexual, though she is beautiful in a vexing way.  

She’s alien and confident and... handsome. Like him. It’s only now that he’s gone that Dean can admit it to himself. That Cas was pretty, nice to look at. That when they first met, the unquestioning way he moved, assumed space, was weirdly pleasant for Dean. This girl, she moves the way he did.

Before Dean ruined him.

“Are... you ok?”

A female voice pulls him from his thoughts and he jolts minutely, immediately mortified as the girl’s dark blue eyes watch him carefully.

“Sorry,” he clears his throat. His hands are still shaking as he swipes her card, he hadn’t even realized he was holding it.

 

...

 

Dean likes to sit on the dingy, peeled-paint front porch of his little house as the sun goes down. There’s something about the way the sun sinks and spreads over the dry grass that reminds him of his childhood. A lot of it is gone now, the recollection of early peace, or at least fragmented in a way that’s confusing. Sometimes reaching back for those memories can be disorienting in a way that gets him stuck. He isn’t sure how much of it is age and how much of it is Michael, but the memories of his antebellum life get harder to access all the time. So it’s nice, to be able to sit quietly, beer in hand, and watch the sun turn the dried Kansas grass from prickly straw into a horizon of glowing yellow-gold and know without looking too hard into the past that it feels like something he used to know.

 

...

 

Dean enjoys being alone.

Other people make him uncomfortable now. Not always in ways that he can explain, much to Sam’s (blessedly subtle) frustration. Dean isn’t sure what he would do if his brother was irritated outright at Dean’s lack of ability to verbalize the ways in which the proximity of anyone who isn’t Sam makes his skin crawl, his hackles raise, his body tense. 

Frustratingly, Dean isn’t comfortable around people, loves his solitude, and is somehow still a little weary of his isolation.

He’s lonely, Sam says. Dean shoots him a hard look and an eye roll because Sam has always succeeded at making their lives sound like some sort of Hallmark movie. Dean’s killed Death, he’s not going to admit to something as simple and girly as being sad. As usual, Sam is right but Dean has zero intention of owning that. Though he can admit it to himself. He is lonely. 

Dean is lonely because this life he has now was never really for him. At the end, Dean had wanted to get out. He’d never thought the day would come that he’d out grow the blaze of glory, hail of bullets destiny he’d always pictured for himself. He’d resigned himself to that, even glorified it in his mind to make it not so goddamned depressing. But some time between being dragged through hell and burning one too many of his best friends, Dean just got tired and started to believe that maybe, just maybe, he’d done enough. He dared to let himself wonder if he didn’t have to end that way, and he’d even allowed himself brief moments to hope. It’s a hard thing to keep in mind, but at that point he was ready to put effort into _not_ dying. As they faced-off against Lucifer one last time, Dean told himself that he was done, that they were all going to be done, and he meant it.

He never intended to make it out alone.

Sam is alive, that’s true. But, much to Dean’s surprise, it seems like he’s not done after all. Dean can’t find in himself to hold all of the years of Sam toeing the line of retirement against him. He’s always understood that struggle, even when he refused to admit so out loud. He can’t say his heart doesn’t ache knowing that Sam didn’t follow him out, knowing that Sam, even now, had to zig when Dean couldn’t help but zag. In a way - though it always hurts - Dean is always ready for Sam to need something different. In a way, he wasn’t unprepared for civilian life to have less of Sam in it.

And in reality, his rational mind had reasoned that Castiel could never stay. There were plenty of reasons why an existence after hunting would mean that Cas ceased to be a part of his life. It made sense, that after Dean gave up the fight, Cas would give up Dean. They were brothers in arms, and without a war to fight, Cas would be needed elsewhere. Even knowing this, though, Dean could never picture life without him. He ignored it, tried to pretend it meant nothing, that it was just a side effect of so many years of familiarity.

But now those thoughts are bald. The unsigned truth of it is this: Dean doesn’t know how to miss him, and yet he does. And now, in yellow-gold sunlight at the end of a quiet day, there’s only one person he wishes was there to share a beer with, to cook dinner for, and Dean aches in acknowledging that it isn’t Sam. And it isn’t possible. 

So Dean is alone. 

 

...

 

Though Dean slowly gets better at sleeping, the hours he does get are not often restful. Sam had encouraged him to see someone, to talk to someone about his problems with hyper vigilance and insomnia and night terrors. It was a suggestion which Dean had too cruelly swatted away with the very realistic counter that if Dean started telling his therapist that he was having nightmares about an archangel using his hands to strangle the life out of some poor barback in Des Moines he’d be receiving a prescription for a one-way ticket to the nut-house.

Dean still wakes up in a cold sweat and has to stumble to the bathroom when he remember that particular incident. He’d been fighting Michael tooth and nail, even shaking him off once or twice, for a few seconds at a time. It hadn’t yet afforded him anything but the satisfaction of Michael’s furious irritation and that slight inkling of confusion and doubt that skittered across his grace, as though he wasn’t sure how Dean - lowly, piddly, human Dean - could possibly overpower him.

Michael had warned him, cold and calm, that Dean would pay for that insubordination if he didn’t be quiet like a good little monkey.

Dean had all but told him to fuck off, too exhausted and victorious to care about what came next. Which was why he could feel Michael’s grace slither and coil with joy at Dean’s cold dread when a handsome barback asked him to stay after closing for a drink off the clock.

Dean had begged, _Don’t_.

Michael had used Dean’s face to smile at the man and said, “Yes.”

Dean was frozen inside him as he felt the ill-intent roil and writhe and build with very passing minute until Michael wrapped Dean’s hands around the handsome man’s throat and squeezed. He let up on his control just enough to let Dean feel it - the pressure, the heat of his skin, the taut muscles and fragile bone in his neck and the way his body kicked and jerked in an attempt to fight him. Michael could have snapped his neck, easily and instantly, could have winked and scattered him into a million pieces. This, the agonizingly slow asphyxiation of some poor guy whose only mistake was finding Dean attractive, was a torture meant for Dean. And there were layers upon layers to the way it crushed him - not just the way he’d used Dean’s hands to end an innocent person’s life, but the way he’d used Dean’s face to woo him, and his voice to lull him and bring him in close, warm and dark-eyed, by the way Michael had licked his lips. It was a taunt, to show Dean just how much he knew.

Michael had thrown the man down where he died still standing, pulled half over the bar as Dean squeezed the life from him. The handsome man had crumpled onto the floor, eyes open and bloody-red from the pressure, and Michael took a minute to look him over for Dean’s benefit. So that he’d have to remember what it looks like when Dean gets mouthy. So that Dean had an image to recall, when Michael reminded him that his attitude has consequences.

The disbelief and terror on the man’s face, when Dean’s hands on his neck had gone from soft to constricting, is something that haunts him, at random intervals throughout the day and night.Dean asks Sam flatly if it’s something he should talk to a therapist about - the guilt he has over murders and assaults and torture that he both did and did not commit. Sam looks drawn and guilty in response, and Dean only feels worse.

 

Dean’s nightmares vacillate between the expected bloody, horrible trauma of failure, and the subtle moments of cruelty toward Cas, which is in some ways so much worse. Sometimes he remembers teasing him, insulting him, throwing him away, brushing him off. He remembers that lost, determined look in his eye when Dean, after ignoring him for the better part of a year, trapped him in Holy Fire and all but called him a traitor. Dean wakes up silently, no screams or whimpers escaping him but just the trembling of a reflective dread. Michael’s voice is in his head on those mornings, a memory that distorts his mind like a phantom limb reaching back for its body, whispering cruelly honest taunts about Dean’s selfishness. How much he took for granted, how little he understood of Castiel’s sacrifice. And the cruelest of all - did Castiel know Dean had any feeling for him at all?

The implication that he was so hard, so cold toward Cas that there was even the possibility that he didn’t even know that Dean counted him a friend, needed him, relied on him, cared deeply for him - that is the doubt, the sickness, that hangs around Dean like smog on ill-slept mornings. He stops himself short, every time, even as he closes his eyes and his lips form around the first consonant of his name - there is no use in praying now. Not now. Not when there’s no one on the other end to hear.

 

...

 

Dean starts a garden.

Sort of.

He clears out a patch of grass in front of the house, tills it (he thinks) and glares very hard at it for an extended period of time. He doesn’t know jack shit about gardening and he’s pretty sure it isn’t something he lost in the Archangel Scramble.

No, he’s pretty sure he never knew anything about earth and seed and growing things. He has an uncanny desire to learn, of a sudden.

Sam teases him, squinting through the sun, “You’re just trying to cut out the middle man.” Dean squints back with an expression that makes Sam smirk. “If you grow your own food then you won’t have to go to the grocery store. One less human you have to deal with.”

Dean rolls his eyes exaggeratedly.

“I’m not gonna live off rosemary and zucchini, Sam - I’m not a complete masochist.”

Sam chuckles, points at Dean’s messy mounds of earth. “They’re supposed to go in rows,” he needles.

Dean chucks a handful of seed at him, “Shut up - what’re you a agricultural phenom now?”

It’s the fastest he’s been able to say anything since he didn’t die. Sam has a wayward seed in his hair, but he smiles big and bright. Dean rolls his eyes again, his cheeks warm.

It isn’t always easy to be himself, but every once in awhile it slips out - like a sneeze. A Dean-sneeze. Unanticipated and unstoppable and seizing his whole body. And brief.

But the way Sam looks at him when he, even for a moment, sounds like his old self, is worth months of struggling just to stay upright.

 

 

...

 

Dean is closing up the shop. It’s a rainy, grey afternoon; stormy and powerful and electric. Humid days like this are worth the extra ache in his battered body for the visceral reminder of Cas - lightning and the smell of rain on the air. The force of nature. It’s sweet punishment, to be reminded so clearly of his friend, to not be allowed to forget.

It’s pain he’s glad for.

Dean’s been thinking about him a lot lately. He’d been diligent in his dedication to not allowing himself to go there for a long time, but it seems the more it rains the less he is able to help himself. 

It’s rained often in the past month. So often that the ground seems overwhelmed by the process of taking on any more water, and Dean’s walk from the house to the shop is a sloshy one. He wakes in the morning to the sound of rain pattering on the windows and thinks of Cas. It occurs to him that on the nights when it rains, he sleeps a little better.

On the walk to work, he smells petrichor and hears the heavens grumble and thinks of Cas.

He listens to the rain hitting the shop windows, and the pavement outside, cracks the little window in the back so he can smell the damp air and hear the overrun gutters and he thinks of Cas.

With no foot traffic likely on yet another stormy afternoon, Dean decides to close the shop. He’s too distracted by his memories to deal with people now anyway. He’s tipping a chair up onto a table when the flicker of lightning draws his eye to the front windows.

At first he reaches to the small of his back, out of instinct, for a gun he no longer carries. There’s a figure, a man, outside his window - too close not to have been watching Dean, too still to be simply caught in the rain. Dean doesn’t move, pinned to the spot in a way the old him never would have been. He’s immobilized by the scramble of his former instincts, no longer readily available.

When the lightning strikes again, Dean knows where to look and it’s bright enough that Dean has time to register what he’s seeing.

Who.

Dean goes numb.

His vision tunnels, his ears ringing, his hands go cold and the rest of his body feels like it’s gone altogether. He stands completely still, breath caught in his chest, and stares at the silhouette of someone impossible framed in the glass doorway of the civilian little deli that Dean now calls home, and he feels the whole world tilt on its axis.


End file.
